Wednesday 16 March 2011 13.49 EDT
First published on Wednesday 16 March 2011 13.49 EDT

Peter Forbes was editor of Poetry Review from 1986-2002 and now writes books on science and art. The Gecko's Foot (2005), is a pioneering work on bioinspiration – engineering solutions adapted from nature. His latest book, Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage (Yale University Press), is shortlisted for the 2011 Warwick prize for writing – awarded biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in any genre or form – whose theme this year is "colour".

"Colours are a natural meeting place of art and science. Their allure has powered exploration, trade routes and scientific innovation: from the mauve dye that gave birth to the modern chemical industry, through the cadmium pigments that gave the Impressionist and Post-Impressionists a new, more vibrant, palette, to the blue lasers that allow vastly more visual imagery to be packed onto a Blu-ray disc. Colour is challenging for writers: like music it appeals directly to the senses, bypassing language. But you can't keep words out of anything, and for some writers words come bathed in colours."

1. The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary

Cary's hero Gulley Jimson is an artist who is as fluent and exuberant in words as in paint. The book brims with rambunctious celebrations and scabrous denunciations: "Gauguin, who is Gauguin? You don't mean that French painter who did dead dolls with green eyes in a tin landscape? I couldn't paint in his style unless I became a Plymouth Brethren with the itch, and practised on public house signs for fifteen years". Jimson scrounges his way around London, punctuating his attempts to procure bed, board and artists' materials while mentally composing his work in progress, The Living God. He writes in impressionistic verbal sketches and even in a charged moment of lustful reverie he can't help composing a picture: " ... her hair falling over her knees, and a bluish light on the shiny flats round the spine – sky reflection – a sweet bit of brushwork". Everything that happens to him is a form of painting: he is painting the world.

In Matisse's classic paper cut-outs, published in 1947 in book form as stencil prints, the pure colours, biomorphic forms and insouciant renderings of Les Bêtes de la Mer and Les Milles et Une Nuits are as close as one can get to pure visual joy. Matisse is a great colourist throughout his work but in Jazz, with its flat, even toned colours, Matisse the draftsman and Matisse the colourist find their perfect harmony.

3. Adaptive Coloration in Animals by Hugh Cott

This classic work from 1940 details the countless ways in which creatures, especially insects, exploit colour and pattern resemblances in order to obscure them from sight or to advertise their unpalatability. Some of the gaudiest patterns in nature – the wings of Heliconius butterflies, the bands of the coral snake and its mimics – employ a palette of red, yellow, white and black, which also happen to be the colours human beings use for their warning signs. The book, illustrated mostly in black and white, with Cott's own drawings and photographs, is so rich in dramatic adaptations and bizarre lifestyles, the lack of colour doesn't seem to matter.

4. Ostensibly There is Colour by Democritus

Democritus was the founder of the theory of atomism; his work is known only in fragments, such as this highly gnomic and influential passage:

"Ostensibly there are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, ostensibly there is color; but in truth there are atoms and the void".

Democritus's idea is developed at length in the Roman poet Lucretius's long poem, De Rerum Natura. Democritus's aphorism introduced the vastly influential principle of the primary and secondary qualities. The primaries are measurable properties such as mass, dimensions, time; the secondaries are the sensual qualities – colour, smell, sound, taste and touch. It was this distinction that enabled science to develop by clearing away the subjectivism of sensual imprecision. It also caused the tragic split between art and science, with figures from Donne through Goethe to Feyerabend denouncing the primary/secondary schism as reductive ("Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone", cried Donne).

But the fact that fizzing colour is caused by fizzing atoms in no way detracts from the Matissean pleasure it gives. In fact, some of the most gorgeous "colours", such as the iridescent patches on butterfly and bird wings have no pigments at all. The shimmering hues are the result of light playing with nano structures of a similar wavelength to the light itself. The result is the peacock's whirlpools of colour. Some reduction!

Darwin's "other" theory concerns sexual selection – he believed that the highly coloured and exotic patterns of many creatures (usually males) is a result of females choosing mates with the most flamboyant characteristics. The classic example is the peacock's tail, which is in every sense except its attractiveness to us and to peahens, a liability. The theory is that if the bird can cope with the cumbersome weight of this appendage, look so enticing, and survive long enough to mate, its line must be worth perpetuating. Endless Forms looks at the cross traffic between visual art and natural history in Darwin's time. Darwin was a self-confessed dunce at drawing – a handicap for a naturalist – but as Munro, points out, "to compensate he substituted a rich variety of colour descriptions". So the scientist in Darwin deduced the correct theory of coral reef formation, while the artist in him marvelled at their many shades of red: from "bright peach blossom" to "pale lake-red".

In one of the great novels of black consciousness, Ellison, writing in the early 1950s, renders black as "invisible". From this humiliated/privileged vantage point he restlessly prowls his neighbourhood, becoming a passionate street activist. Every scene is vivid to the point of hyper-reality and for a man who feels invisible, Ellison has a palette as bright as that of any writer: "I looked towards the window to see an eruption of colour, as though a gale had whipped up a bundle of brightly coloured rags. It was an aviary of tropical birds ... I watched the surge and flutter of the birds as their colours flared for an instant like an unfurled oriental fan".

7. Vowels by Rimbaud

Rimbaud preached "the systematic derangement of all the senses" and he perhaps experienced synaesthesia, the crossover between the senses, or in his case, between vowels and colours. The poem makes the correspondences: A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. Strangely, experiments on random groups of people suggest that many people do associate vowels with colours, but not in Rimbaud's pairings; A red, E blue, I black, O white, U yellow is a common set of associations.

John Gage wrote his magnum opus because, as he says, "Color is almost everyone's business but it has rarely been treated in a unified way". One of Gage's most exciting chapters is The Sound of Color, exploring the parallels between colour harmony and the musical variety. Of all arts these are the closest: the 12-note scale is chromatic and with bent notes music, like colour, can produce any gradation you like. For some musicians, "colour" is music's most thrilling property. For Van Gogh "my brush goes between my fingers as a bow would on a violin" and Scriabin employed a colour keyboard to add spectral harmonies to his works.

9. Messages from Psyche by Philip Howse

The marine biologist and mimicry expert Sir Alister Hardy once wrote: "I think it likely that there are no finer galleries of abstract art than the cabinet drawers of the tropical butterfly collector. Each "work" is a symbol, if I must not say of emotion, then of vivid life ... It is often, I believe, the fascination of this abstract colour and design, as much as an interest in biology or a love of nature, that allures the ardent lepidopterist ... he has his favourite genera and dotes upon his different species of Vanessa and Parnassius, as the modernist does upon his examples of Matisse or Ben Nicholson".

But no one outside a museum or laboratory can now possess cabinets of butterflies: we need books to pin these elusive creatures down. In Messages from Psyche the glory of butterflies and the oddity of caterpillars is lavishly displayed, but the often bizarre patterns they make in mimicking their surroundings and sometimes other creatures are explored too. For me, the prize goes to the caterpillar of the puss moth which, when alarmed, puts on a face with a bright red-rimmed gaping mouth and dark eyespots. As Sir Ernst Gombrich pointed out, nature was a cartoonist and expressionist long before anyone ever set up an easel.

10. The Venetian Vespers by Anthony Hecht

Many poets and novelists have practiced exotic colour writing: "azure" and "cerulean" are the aesthetes' favourites. But the mere naming of a colour can fall like a piece of clinker in a sentence – it is only a signifier and cannot evoke sensuous beauty. American poet Hecht was the late-20th-century master of baroque gorgeousness and its chiaroscuran counterpart: Grand Guignol horror. He shows, by building word pools and amassing hoards of prismatic gems, that chromatic effects are not beyond poetry: